


All The Lights Shine For Someone Else

by Seerofterribleomens



Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s12e18 The Memory Remains, Episode: s12e21 There's Something About Mary, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 20:26:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10624521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seerofterribleomens/pseuds/Seerofterribleomens
Summary: All the lights shine for someone else and he is alone in this darkness.





	1. Chapter 1

When someone quietens the screaming in your soul should it matter to them? Should it mean anything? 

She isn’t for him. And he could never be for her. How can this dog ever be the match of the great, the fabled John Winchester? 

He listens to the brothers chatting, not surprised by Dean’s disparaging. What does surprise him is that it hurts. Not like it hurt when his mother said it didn’t mean anything, he didn’t mean anything. But that hurt surprised him too. 

She brings him too close to the surface. His soul belongs in the deep, withering, dying slowly, out of sight of the world.

Once he dreamed of the great void between the spaces of the world, of the whales and the wind, of the lady with the lotus blossom and the black-eyed boy. But in this world all the lights shine for someone else and he is alone in this darkness. He has grown used to the fact, but the pain still seeps in, unbidden, unchecked. There is no compassion for this dog.

And family? That is alright for some. He can lie to her, but he doesn’t bother trying to lie to himself anymore. He was made more than he was born. He doesn’t even know his mother’s name; to those who arranged his birth she was little better than an incubator for a necessary child. There must be a Ketch, a name to instil fear into the monsters who would take on the Men of Letters and those who would hunt those monsters. A four-hundred-year legacy in a child, taken and made into worse than what he hunts; less. That is his family.

He has never questioned it. Not even when they stripped him naked and strapped him down and hollowed him out. He doesn’t question his orders, even though he knows how ineffective their sacred code really is, how little of a difference they really make. He’s a good dog and does what he’s told, but he’s long since given up expecting anything but contempt in return for his canine loyalty.

She makes him want more, want to _be_ more. He gazes at the face in the photograph, smiling for someone else. She is a miracle, thirty-three years dead, resurrected into a new world, into his world, to touch a withered soul trapped in the vast cavern of his brutal, empty life. It is a cold, cruel power to do such a thing when there is no hope of escape from that cage. 

He watches the lines of his fate bleed and fade behind stinging eyes that lost the ability to weep too long ago. An ocean could not wash away the blood he’s spilled. Absolution is given to men, dogs are put down. There will be no second chances for him from either side in this war he was born to be torn apart in, to die in. And there will be no second thought for him when it is done.


	2. A Worm in the Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during S12 E21, directly after Ketch leaves Mary in her cell. It probably doesn't make any sense because I'm mostly just in a bad place and need to let it out.

He slams the door to his quarters, shutting out any questions, retrieves the med kit from under his bunk and treats the burn on his neck from the gun going off.

He curses himself under his breath for being so damn careless.

Somewhere amidst those curses the tears come, stealthy and silent, and he puts his head in his hands and weeps.

He should never have let this happen. He should go out there and stop it from continuing.

Except he doesn’t know how.

Her pain is eating him like a worm in his heart. He knows what is coming, the hollowness in her eyes, the burying alive of the woman he was foolish enough to begin to care about, even though he should know better. He knows what happens when he lets himself feel … anything.

Yet there is a part of him that _wants_ this, who wants … what? To not be alone in this hell that is the only world he knows?

What no one can ever see is how much he hates himself.


	3. At the End of All Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I know they are going to kill Ketch next week. It's easier to kill the hard ones than find a way to save them. 
> 
> I'm tired of losing the ones that let me feel. Every time it seems to get harder. 
> 
> I need to give him a moment of peace, a place to rest a while.

He leans back against his car and looks up at the stars. He dreamt last night, sleeping at his desk because he dreaded the thought of lying in bed, thinking. It has been … almost seven years now since his one perfect day, since he has been able to dream. 

In his dream there was starlight and porphyry and whale song.

And the black-eyed boy smiled.

Mary waits, unmoving, eyes hollow, for his orders. He is putting this off. He knows this is the last time he will see the stars, breath the night. He won’t come out of that bunker this time, his story ends tonight with a bullet in his back, or something similar, and perhaps it is past due, but there is nothing he would not give for one more night, one more dream.

There are no second chances for Arthur Ketch, no one is going to try to save him. He is incidental to their story. He doesn’t mean anything. 

But there is more between the stars than they will ever see.

He watches her in the side mirror. He can’t love. They buried that with the rest of him under the squeezing, numbing mountain of programming. Oh, it has other names, but he tends to think of it as programming, after all, it is machines they want, robots that torture and kill and follow orders without question. He doesn’t want to love. The last time he loved something they put him in a dark hole for a year, taking him out to cut him open and scrape him out and pump him full of Outsider-knows-what and make him watch as they destroyed the thing he loved. Then they put a gun in his hand and told him to kill. It was months before any feelings at all began to bleed in around the edges, through the cracks, and years before he could name it as pain. 

He let them do that to her; he facilitated it. You can’t love a person and let everything that makes them who they are be buried under a mountain of nothingness. 

But he left her sons down in that bunker - alive - gave them a fighting chance. Hess would have made her kill them, that’s what Hess does. He won’t let her be the one to kill them, even if that means his death, at their hands, or hers. 

Stretching this moment out any longer is pointless.

So he’ll move now to the end of this story and he’ll return to that place that is the end of all things and perhaps there will be a little peace for him there, between the worlds, between the stars, and maybe he can sleep until … until there is a new story.

**Author's Note:**

> I had to post this before I chickened out. No betaing, any mistakes are my own. It might get added to or revised if my brain decides to shake out anything more I'm not too embarrassed to post.
> 
> Ketch is typical of characters I get too involved in, and I'm so scared for him right now, and just want to wrap him up in a big warm blanket and keep him safe from the nasty writer-people. 
> 
> Very minor crossover with the Dishonored universe, 'cause I'm slightly obsessed at the moment. I just hope Ketch will not have to kill his empress.
> 
> The Lady with the Lotus Flower is Kuan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.
> 
> The image of the lights shining for someone else is shamelessly borrowed from the brilliant Guy Gavriel Kay's The Darkest Road.


End file.
